Many traditional television stations have expanded their services to provide regular broadcast programming via the Internet. Unfortunately, such service often exhibits poor video quality and is unreliable. For example, during periods of great demand (e.g. during football/soccer games, popular primetime shows, breaking news, etc.), the service may become overloaded, and frame drops or complete service interruptions may occur.
Prior art FIG. 1 illustrates a system 100 by which traditional television stations provide broadcast programming over a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet. As shown, the system 100 includes a content source 102 (e.g. a studio, pre-recorded programming, etc.) that feeds an encoder 104 which, in turn, encodes video content for the purpose of broadcasting the same via a digital television transmitter 106.
In addition to the foregoing infrastructure, the system 100 further includes a plurality of computers 108, 110, 112, etc. adapted for receiving the aforementioned video content. However, instead of preparing the video content for traditional broadcasting, the computers 108, 110, 112 encode the video content for transmission over a WAN 114 (e.g. the Internet, etc.) to one or more clients 116.
Unfortunately, as the number of clients 116 grows, the computers 108, 110, 112 are unable to adequately support transmission of the video content over the WAN 114, particularly during the aforementioned periods of great demand. As mentioned before, this results in undesirable frame drops, complete service interruptions, etc. There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.